In this attractive and accessible book, Eric D. Weitz surveys the main aspects of life in Germany between 1918 and 1933. Successive chapters describe the establishment of the Republic amid postwar chaos; the Berlin of the 1920s; politics; economics; architecture; photography, cinema, and other new media; literary culture; new attitudes toward the body; and finally the successive crises that led to Hitler's being made chancellor of Germany. While a more integrated account would be conceivable, this scheme offers clarity at the cost of occasional repetition (thus we hear twice about the Dawes Plan, and Brüning is twice reprehended for calling an unnecessary election in 1930).
Although Weitz propounds no new thesis about the fate of the Republic, as an experienced historian he naturally has his own emphases. The Republic's original sin was the failure of the Social Democrats to confront the conservative Right. Friedrich Ebert, when handed the chancellorship by Prince Max von Baden in November 1918, did not even envisage a republic; his colleague Philipp Scheidemann jumped the gun by proclaiming the Republic and thus hastening the abdication of the Kaiser. Faced with civil unrest, paramilitary forces roaming the country, and workers' councils in major cities, the new government employed the Devil to drive out Beelzebub by enlisting the army and paramilitaries (Freikorps) to suppress revolution in Munich and elsewhere. Its minister of defence, Gustav Noske, combated a workers' uprising early in 1919 by ordering that armed civilians who resisted troops should be shot immediately. “It was a sad sign of the times,” comments Weitz, “and of the government's terrible shortsightedness, that a socialist-led government authorized right-wing troops to shoot workers struggling for a more democratic and socialist Germany” (p. 31).
The Weimar constitution, proclaimed on 11 August 1919, was flawed by allowing proportional representation which, in Weitz's view, perpetuated the political fragmentation of the Republic. With a broad range of parties, each representing irreconcilable sectional interests and some opposed to the very existence of the Republic, government had to be done by weak coalitions. Allied with the middle-class DDP (democratic Party) and the Catholic Centre Party, the SDP abandoned Socialism while retaining a Marxist rhetoric that alienated potential supporters. Having failed to tackle the Right in 1918–19, they found themselves confronting an ultraconservative opposition that wanted to bring down the Republic and was supported by the traditional elites surviving powerfully in the army, the civil service, education, and the churches. The Republic's fate was sealed when this traditional Right joined with the new, lower-class Right organized by the NSDAP. Weitz stresses that Hitler added no new elements to Weimar politics; he brought organizational and rhetorical skills, including the masterstroke of fusing anti-Bolshevism and anti-Semitism. The Nazis impressed the populace by organizing not only marches and brawls, but also charitable work such as soup kitchens for the destitute. While Hitler could claim credit for war service, most Nazi leaders belonged to a slightly younger generation that had narrowly missed the War (and were driven to overcompensate). Their relative youth helped to make Nazism look modern and dynamic.
The fragile Republic was of course further assailed by economic crises: first the hyperinflation of 1922–24; then, after a period of recovery, by the effects of the Great Depression. Weitz might have made more of the self-defeating severity of the Allies' reparation demands, though he does point out that the immediate cause of hyperinflation was a wage–price spiral internal to the German economy. A recurring theme is that the Republic's social welfare programs were vulnerable to economic pressure. Thus the establishment of the “Rentenmark” in late 1923 halted inflation but also frustrated attempts to limit working hours, while the unemployment insurance fund, founded amid controversy in 1927, was rapidly bankrupted by the effects of the Depression, and its failure helped to discredit democratic government.
In recounting this history, Weitz does not always avoid misusing hindsight. When deploring the “foolhardy, tragic decision” of the early Socialist government to rely on paramilitaries (p. 97), he might have considered what their range of options in 1919 actually was. An exercise in virtual history, as advocated by Niall Ferguson, could have been useful. Later Weitz wonders at the “naïveté” of diplomats and public who celebrated the Treaty of Locarno: “Did they not have any prescience of the disasters that lay ahead?” (p. 111). No; how could they have? Despite this lapse, however, Weitz is refreshingly clear that Hitler's rise to power was not inevitable. It depended on a series of misjudgments: by Brüning in calling an election in which the NSDAP got 18.3% of the vote; by Papen in calling another (July 1932) in which they got 37.3%; on the government's failure to exploit the Nazis' setbacks when Hitler unsuccessfully challenged Hindenburg for the presidency and their share of the vote, in the November 1932 election, sank to 33.1%; and of course on Papen's delusion that Hitler, when made chancellor, could be manipulated. While this is familiar, it is good to be firmly reminded that, pace A. J. P. Taylor, German history does not lead inexorably to the Third Reich.
Political and economic history of course form only part of Weitz's project. The account in his opening chapter of Germany in late 1918 is an excellent essay in social history, moving between generalizations and vividly illustrative data. The diverse experiences of men and women are neatly conveyed, as are the interactions between elites and workers: thus the sailors' mutiny at Kiel in October 1918 foiled the admirals' plans to frustrate peace negotiations by staging a final sea battle. There is much valuable social history also in Chapter 2, where Weitz, with the help of such contemporary journalists as Franz Hessel and Joseph Roth, takes us on a virtual walking tour of Berlin that includes not only the Potsdamer Platz but the working-class area nicknamed ‘Red Wedding’ and the new housing estates at Onkel Toms Siedlung.
Among the cultural chapters, that on architecture is particularly successful. Weitz is enthusiastic about the work of Bruno Taut, who designed neat modern apartments on a human scale to replace the cramped nineteenth-century tenements, and particularly about Erich Mendelsohn, whose Einstein Tower at Potsdam he praises for its harmony with its natural and built surroundings and for its playfulness. By contrast, Walter Gropius based his Bauhaus group on a severe conception of modernity as requiring a complete break with the past, on function as the sole source of beauty, and on collective work, which Weitz contrasts unfavorably with Taut's humanity and Mendelsohn's acknowledgment of creative genius. Discussing photography, Weitz makes a persuasive case for the somewhat neglected work of the former Bauhaus collaborator László Moholy-Nagy, but is somewhat reserved about August Sander, whose panorama of German life he finds too obsessively focused on a single country.
Weitz is less convincing on literature. He gives very conventional accounts of The Magic Mountain and The Threepenny Opera (strangely calling it Threepenny for short). Had he been less bedazzled by Thomas Mann's displays of Bildung, he might have noticed Mann's efforts to make science accessible (through the X-ray episode and Hans Castorp's reading in physiology) and the recurrent theme of death onto which Mann displaces the trauma of the First World War. It is odd to claim that The Threepenny Opera was Brecht's “breakthrough theatrical work” (p. 294): it looks more like a dead end, whereas the contemporaneous Lehrstücke, however unattractive, point forward to the major exile plays. Occasionally Weitz gives incorrect data. Frank (not “Franz”) Wedekind died in 1918, so did not contribute to postwar Expressionist theater (p. 24). Arnold Zweig did not join the Communist Party (p. 335). The Magic Mountain was published in 1924, not 1925 (p. 1).
Some readers will regret that only brief reference is made to Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and the Frankfurt School, and none to the Warburg Institute. However, Weitz is not offering an encyclopedic survey, and while Benjamin and Adorno need no further publicity, it is good to find several pages devoted to the undeservedly less-known Siegfried Kracauer.
Although this book does not claim to break new ground, it can be recommended – especially for its numerous and well-chosen illustrations – to the student or general reader as a stimulating introduction to the Weimar Republic.
